How long for DS1813+ to completely set up 15TB

After getting a fresh new Synology DS1813+, of course you need to spend time to set it up. I was quite wary of the set up time in terms of initializing the hard disks. Previously when I set up 2 hard disks of 3 TB in my DX510, it took me 2 days ! And this time it was about 15TB (5 pieces of Western Digital RED 3TB each). I have already started to have nightmares of how long it would take.

Surprisingly it was pretty fast in the end 🙂 🙂

Let’s go through the process. First you can download the Synology Assistant tool from the internet to set up the Synology. Installing it and then running it, it immediately found the 2 Synology NAS that I have in my local network (the original 1511+ and the new 1813+). This is of course after you have plug the new NAS into your house network 🙂

And clicking on the new NAS will launch the DSM installation program:

And walking through the process, including the all important step of setting up the ADMIN account:

And downloading the latest version of the DSM:

And less than 10 minutes later, you are done. You can now log into your NAS and you can then see that the NAS is creating the file system. Which should take very little time:

Technically, at this time, you can start using your NAS but for me, I prefer to wait for the whole hard disk initialisation and checking process to be over. You can see that it is now starting and trust me, it will take a while.

12-15 hours later, I checked and it is about 75% done. Pretty faster. Definitely faster than the DS1511+

And finally it is done. All beautiful 5 hard disks of 3TB (but due to RAID and the byte calculation crap, the final available is 10TB)

So how long did it really take ? Let’s check out the log:

From and including: Monday, 23 September 2013, 16:18:39
To, but not including Tuesday, 24 September 2013, 12:08:57

I am using SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID). This is the setting for the new DS1813+ (Western Digital RED NAS editions). For my previous DS1511+, I am using RAID5 on Seagate Hard Disks (none NAS edition). For this previous one, I did have twice failures. See this link: http://patnotebook.com/synology-ds1511-hard-disk-crash-not/

I got my NAS (1813+) and RED WD drives during COMEX and at the ACE store 🙂